The Rev. Rosalind Hughes is an Episcopal priest and an immigrant from the United Kingdom.Rosalind Hughes

Guest columnist Rosalind C Hughes is an Episcopal priest and immigrant from the United Kingdom. She is a contributing editor at the Episcopal Cafe, and her blog, Over the Water, is at rosalindhughes.com

Nikki was from New Orleans, but I met her by the pool at our condo in Singapore. Lazy in the sun, we watched the older children swim while the baby fetched buckets of water to pour over our feet. Nikki told me how, back home, she was considered an over-protective mother, because she insisted, before her son went on a play date, on asking whether there were guns in the home.

Nikki was a first responder. She knew too well what could go wrong. As a young British mother, in the year 2000, half a world away from home, it seemed a lesson I was unlikely to need to learn.

In late November,2016, I was living near Cleveland, Ohio. It was a Monday. I picked up my phone from the kitchen table: three missed messages from my youngest child, away at the Ohio State University.

"I'm safe." "Mother." "People died."

In the minutes and hours following a critical incident, hard news is hard to come by. By late afternoon, we knew that a student had rammed his car onto the sidewalk and attacked his neighbors with a knife. A campus officer felled him with the only shots fired. His was the body they had seen, lying still, after the wounded had been ambulanced away.

He was young and impetuous; too inexperienced in his hate to take account of the concrete flower pots that acted as bollards to protect the pedestrians. Thank God, he did not have a gun.

Weeks later, straight down High Street at the Ohio State Capitol, they passed the so-called "Guns Everywhere" Bill. Now, they are considering making it official: even in places where guns are not allowed, HB233 says it will be OK to carry, as long as you are not caught.

But what does the notion that a trip to the local sports bar requires a concealed weapon do to our way of being in community? What do guns in schools teach our children about how to live together? What does the introduction of weapons to our churches say about our faith?

There is something profoundly alienating about the idea that the only way we can be safe is to be ready at any moment to kill. It is a bias of mine that we do not make ourselves or one another safer by carrying death more closely in our pockets, or binding its tools to our bodies.

I recognize the irony that the cross I sometimes wear over my heart was itself an instrument of terror, as excruciating as any organ damage inflicted by a bullet. Even the stories surrounding the crucifixion of Christ include cynical debates over who carries the right to kill.

Perhaps, two thousand years later and half a world away, we still have some lessons to learn.

For example, when Jesus said, "Suffer the little children," he did not mean, "Make them suffer." On the contrary, he was saying, "Let them live."

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